


second foundation

by ottermo



Series: As Prompted [30]
Category: Humans (TV)
Genre: Gen, Post Series 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-14
Updated: 2017-10-14
Packaged: 2019-01-17 05:48:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12358791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ottermo/pseuds/ottermo
Summary: A glimpse into the post-proliferation world.Probably a sunnier one than we're going to get, but during hiatus, a girl can dream.





	second foundation

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Week 1, Day 5 of the Humans 4-Week Challenge. The prompt was "After the End".

Six months after Proliferation, groups of synths were still arriving at the base every day. Some of them were fleeing their old lives and hoping to find refuge - others were just there for reassurance, to learn for themselves what had happened to them and why, then return to their homes. The ones who stayed often joined the team of volunteers, which was speeding up the work immensely. It also meant a higher quality of support could be given to synths who’d come from particularly traumatic backgrounds - ex-factory synths could talk to ex-factory synths, military synths need only look into the eyes of a fellow ex-soldier if at first they could not voice their pain to anybody else.

It was working across the board. Synths struggling with missing or broken limbs, impaired audio or visual circuitry, grief, anxiety, trauma, disorientation, or any of the other effects of synthetic exploitation no human language yet had names for… all of them could find solace in shared experience, while also contributing to a unity between the groups, as they all came to understand one another. Yes, there was still a lot of opposition in the outside world. But at Drummond Base Ten - named for two of its martyrs and counting amongst its staff those who had known them best - peace was thriving.

Laura Hawkins, Karen Voss and Alex Kennedy served on the board of directors, officially establishing the base as a legal entity. The rest of the board comprised Max Elster, Mia Elster and Flash Singh, who weren’t legally recognised as members - yet. Laura and the legal team she headed up were working around the clock to change that for all the newly-awakened synths. Of course, unbeknownst to anyone outside Drummond Base Ten, there was already a synthetic on the official board, but Karen had been willing to extend her years of subterfuge for as long as it took, since it meant they could use her unique experiences from the inside.

Drummond Base Ten worked in conjunction with similar bases around the world, sharing resources and ideas. The foremost of these were Millican Base, which operated on mainland Europe, headed officially by Astrid Schaeffer and unofficially by Niska Elster, and Virginia Base in the US, headed by Athena Morrow and funded by Milo Khoury. The latter had, according to the headlines, sold his shares in Qualia and its associate corporations for billions of dollars, and was now using his fortune to rehabilitate, repair, or otherwise help synthetics, in addition to reeducating his fellow organics. Nobody knew for sure what had caused this dramatic change of heart, but these days he was accompanied everywhere by a tiny, blonde-haired child, whom he had adopted as a daughter. Rumour had it that fatherhood had turned him soft, dissolved his backbone. Those who’d come close enough to see the bright green eyes that hid behind Hello Kitty sunglasses knew it was something far more than that.

There were smaller organisations, too, some of them set up by synths who had chosen to band together in their place of origin, rather than make the pilgrimage to one base or another. Periodically, the larger bases sent teams to these more remote places, comprised of both humans and synths, to stay for a while and help. These offers were rarely refused, and the network of bases both small and large grew stronger by the day.

The bases were supported as much by neighbours as by those who could live on-site - Drummond Base Ten boasted a small army of such volunteers, some of whom were not even out of school. Toby Hawkins and Renie Barber considered the base to be a second home, and even little Sophie devoted most of her evenings and weekends to the place. She was invaluable, in fact. Many of the synths who’d been childminders or domestic servants missed the company of human children, and Sophie dutifully listened to a library’s worth of bedtime stories on a regular basis. At other times, she would play in the grounds with the Seraph children, and she and Sam Drummond-Voss were the firmest of friends. Sometimes Sophie still walked like a synth, but she would just as often be seen dancing, skipping and cartwheeling down corridors, with the Seraphs following behind, trying to mimic her sloppy, carefree movements as avidly as she could imitate their smooth, measured ones. It was a balance, a fusion. Sometimes her mother would watch her through the windows of her office and wish that the rest of their species would only follow her daughter’s lead.

For every one human who was for their cause, there were two who were uneasy, and five or six who were outright hostile. The smaller bases were particularly vulnerable to attacks - mostly of vandalism, but sometimes uglier things. Larger bases sent more relief teams in such cases, who took with them building supplies and tools, to help repair what had been damaged. The recently recovered Fred Elster, thought dead by his family for almost a year, was now the head of these relief operations. It was said that in the evenings, when the walls were rebuilt and the paintwork restored, he would go back to the truck for one last supply: his guitar. Long into the night, the humans and synths who’d worked on the repairs would sing songs, old ones and new ones, teaching each other the lyrics where they were remembered, or composing new ones in their place. These songs spread across the network of bases, songs about freed people, looking to the light.

Mattie Hawkins was still attending university, but had changed the focus of her studies. Before her success with the consciousness code, she’d been focusing her attentions on deep system programming, hoping to find out how David Elster had harnessed the spark of life. Though the mystery remained, it was much less relevant now. The theoretics of it might be interesting from the same point of view as the origins of biological life, but it was no longer an anomaly needing replication.

Mattie decided that her efforts would be better spent helping the synths who were suffering. She changed her modules to ones that focused on synth engineering, the finer details of their mechanisms and how best to repair them. She fixed Odi’s arm as her first official project, and later restored his optic functions too. Once she had repaired the circuitry in his hands, he was steady enough to join her in her work, and together they had repaired nearly a thousand synths by the time Drummond Base Ten was a year old. They, or their apprentices Howard and Harun, were often sent on relief missions to the remote bases too, and so Mattie learned to fix synths who had sustained painful damage while working on oil rigs, down coal mines, in sweatshops and industrial facilities, and even in less obvious settings like plantations, prisons and restaurant kitchens. It was hard work, emotionally and physically, but it was never the same two days in a row. Mattie and Odi were each other’s only real constants, and what had passed between them before Odi’s second awakening had only brought them closer.

Of course, there was one repair Mattie had no control over, however much she might have wanted to help. Leo Elster slept on, in a room attached to Drummond Base Ten, where outward wires and monitors communed with the ones already inside him, keeping him alive, but comatose. Mia often sat with him when she wasn’t needed elsewhere, speaking softly to him of the day’s events, of hope and light and change. She painted a mural on the walls of his room, flowers and trees that weaves their leaves around the windows, light fittings and the machines that kept him breathing. Niska visited Leo too, on assignments from Millican Base, often threatening him in gentle tones that if he didn’t wake up before human-synth marriage was legalised, she’d have to drag him to Germany on a stretcher.

But it was his brother Max who was with him the day he finally surfaced - three weeks after Drummond Base Ten had celebrated its first anniversary, almost fifteen months into his coma. Leo’s eyes flickered slowly open, roved about, eventually found Max’s smile. How much of his memory remained, Max couldn’t be sure in those first moments, but his lips twitched into an echo of Max’s expression, smaller and weaker but full of recognition, speaking volumes louder than his disused vocal chords would manage for weeks.

“Hello, Leo,” said Max, his eyes bright with joy. “Welcome back.”

There was so much to tell him, and so much of it was good. Better than any of them had ever dared to hope.


End file.
